LIGHT ON THE PATH - 114 : Seek it not by any one road. - 7

🌹 LIGHT ON THE PATH - 114 🌹

🍀 For those WHO DESIRE TO ENTER WITHIN - For DISCIPLES 🍀

✍️. ANNIE BESANT and LEADBEATER
📚. Prasad Bharadwaj

CHAPTER 8 - THE 20th RULE

🌻 20. Seek it not by any one road. - 7 🌻

434. The divine fragment is the Monad, which is reproduced in the triple spirit on the nirvanic plane. There atma is threefold, and it puts down one of its powers into the buddhic and another into the mental plane. It contains the possibilities of the Logos, but is at first quite incapable of expressing them.

Atma pouring itself forth appears in Manas as the individualizing principle, the “I”-making faculty that gives rise to individuality in time, as the opposite to Eternity. It draws round it matter to express itself on the upper manasic plane, and thus creates as its vehicle the causal body, which lasts .throughout the long series of human incarnations. That is the body created with pain, by means of which the man purposes to develop.

435. Think of Atma as pouring itself forth on to the third plane downwards, the manasic plane. It draws around itself matter of the highest level of that plane, and forms the causal body. That body is then its vehicle for the expression of the manasic aspect of itself on that plane. It is manas working through the causal body.

This manas becomes dual in incarnation. It reaches down into the lower levels of the mental plane, and forms there a vehicle – the lower manas – which in turn builds the astral body. In its turn that provides the force which builds the etheric and physical bodies.

Each body on its own plane is a means for gathering experience, which when suitable is handed on to that which formed the vehicle; so after the personal incarnation is over the lower manas hands on to the causal body all the experience that it has gained, and the personality perishes. The causal body takes whatever experiences are of a nature to help its growth, and they remain with it through all its future incarnations.

436. The causal body also has a relation to what is above it. What happens on the inner or upper side of that vehicle is the passing on into the third aspect of atma of the essence of all experiences which may have entered into it; what is thus poured into the manasic aspect of atma renders it capable of acting without the causal body – that is, without a permanent vehicle which limits it.

437. The student who thinks this out, will find that it will throw light on the perishing of the individuality. The same idea appears in the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. The causal body is the individuality,, that which persists throughout the cycle of incarnation. It comes into existence at a certain period of- time; it has to perish at another period.

It is born and it dies. As the Gita says: “Certain is death for the born.”1 (1 Op. cit., II, 27.) This is true not only in the outer world, but in the widest sense; as there is birth of the causal body, so must it perish. It is the thing which the divine fragment has built for himself with much pain.

It is the “I” to the disciple. In some the “I” is thought of as even lower, in the personality, but this is the “I” which has to be reached at the beginning of the Path. It is finally transcended at the close of the Arhat stage of growth, at the real liberation.

Up to that time it is diminishing and changing in character as the Arhat grows. It will ultimately be found to be a defective I”, not the real “I” at all, but at this stage of human evolution any attempt to describe its future condition would be misleading.

Continues...

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04 Mar 2021